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As one of ESPN's newly-hired anchors, Adnan Virk's job is to talk about sports. So it's easiest for him to describe his rise in the broadcasting industry in jock talk.

Before landing with the iconic American sports television network, he was just the son of a Morven convenience store owner, toiling in the Canadian broadcasting scene bouncing from one network to another in search of a long-term career.

"To put it in sports terms, it's like I'm a .250 hitter and then I get traded to the New York Yankees, and we've won the World Series. That's how I feel," said Virk, in a phone interview from West Hartford, Connecticut, where he now lives.

Virk was hired about a year ago to anchor The Highlight Express, which appears on the ESPN News network. The shows is taped every night and airs across the United States repeatedly from 11 p.m. until mid afternoon the next day.

But the road he took to get there was a long one, which he says started as a child growing up in both Kingston and Morven.

Virk was born in Toronto to his mother Taherah and father Zakaria. The family moved to Kingston in 1984 and later to Morven, where they opened Zak's Convenience store. Virk attended Bath Public School for Grades 7 and 8 and later moved on to Ernestown Secondary School, where by Grade 11 he was the head boy.

ESS is celebrating its 50th anniversary later this year and counts Virk amongst its most distinguished graduates.

He said the Ernestown years helped him develop the reading, writing and public speaking skills that would later make him successful in broadcasting. He particularly applauds the mentorship he received from his former English teacher Peter Peart. "He understood me; he knew I had a love for literature," Virk said.

After graduation in 1996, he enrolled in the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson University in Toronto.

He remembers having to work hard to fit in with other students. Many of them were from Toronto and already had experience working as an intern at major television stations. Meanwhile, he had only done a little volunteer work for Kingston's old Cablenet 13 station.

Still, he improved his resume steadily over the years; first by working part-time as script writer for The Score and later taking on another behind-the-scenes job at TSN; all while still in school.

But finding full-time work was still difficult following graduation. Virk humbly recalls being turned down by numerous TV stations, including Kingston-based CKWS, before landing a gig at OMNI Television, a Toronto-based multilingual/multicultural station. He hosted a show called Omniculture and Bollywood Boulevard.

After working there, he was hired in 2003 as an on-air personality for The Score, a job he kept until 2009, when he was hired by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment to work on Raptors TV and Leafs TV.

A few years ago, on the advice of colleagues, he hired an agent to promote his work. He landed an audition with ESPN in February last year and, to his surprise, was offered a position last March.

May 3 will mark his one-year anniversary with the station; a proud accomplishment in his mind.

"There's nothing like ESPN, there's nothing that compares to it," he said. "It's crazy and I finally got my moment to shine."

Virk believes he was hired by ESPN because producers at the network liked his writing skills and on-air personality. Like many sportscasters today, he brings humour to the show, but he's careful not to go over the top with it and he can change his tone of voice to cover a serious story when needed to.

He remembers getting clear instructions from producers to do exactly that.

"They said, 'if you want to do stand-up, go down to Comedy Central. We're doing sports, don't forget that.'" Virk recalled. "You have to know how to handle a hard news story, so to speak."

Still, throwing a few jokes into the set isn't frowned upon either, because producers believe humour can makes sports shows appeal to a wider audience.

"You trying to bring in the wives, the girlfriends. I want to have people say, 'Oh I like his style.' I like to bring those popular culture references in."

Virk said the job is also great because, well, it's all about sports. It's something he tries keeps in mind every time he's stressed at work; trying to write scripts for highlight reels under tight deadline.

"It beats 99.9 per cent of other jobs," he said. "When you step away form the stage you say, 'Oh my God, this is a dream job.'"

Virk also says he loves living in Connecticut. Hartford is a town about Kingston's size, he says, halfway between Boston and New York. It's near Bristol, Connecticut, the home base of ESPN.

He lives in Hartford with his wife Eamon, who he married in 2007, and their three-year-old son, Yusuf.

He says he plans on staying with ESPN for a long time and raising his family in the United States.